Sony Stumbles, Microsoft Crumbles, Nintendo Rumbles

For consumers around the world, this has been the least cheerful holiday season in decades, due to the collapse of the neoliberal credit bubble and the worst global recession in decades. Despite the downturn, the videogame industry has continued its torrid growth. Part of the reason is the sheer complexity of the videogame culture, which exists on so many different platforms (cellphones, handhelds, consoles, computers) and offers so many varied experiences to consumers. The real reason, though, is that videogames remain one of the most affordable mass media of them all. Hardware platforms like the PS2 and Wii are cheap and plentiful, while a vast library of games can be rented or purchased for under $20, or pirated for free.

If Sony and Nintendo shared the honors as the standout console makers of 2007, this year there is one clear winner. Sony stumbled thanks to a questionable holiday season pricing decision, Microsoft continues to underperform, while Nintendo is threatening to run away with the console market.

This may sound surprising, given that Microsoft's PR machine is flooding every known news outlet with the statistic that the Xbox360 outsold the PS3 by a margin of nearly two to one in November (1.8 million to 1.1 million, according to VGChartz data), and may reach 2008 sales of about 12 million units worldwide.¹

Look a little closer, though, and Microsoft's position is disastrous. The relationship of price to sales of mass market electronics is not linear, but exponential. If a high-end device costing $500 sells 100,000 units per month, a similar device priced at $400 will sell 200,000 units per month. Lower the price to $300 or less, and monthly sales will jump to 400,000 units or more. Given its price-point of $299 (with a stripped-down version available for $199), and given the explosive growth of the game market, the 360 should be selling a minimum of 16 million units or more per annum.

What saved Microsoft from complete annihilation this holiday season is Sony's decision to avoid lowering the price of the PS3 this fall. Currently, the PS3's $399/399EUR price tag makes it the most expensive console on the market -- a hefty $100 to $150 more than its competitors. Despite this disadvantage, PS3 sales are on track to reach 10.5 million units in 2008, an impressive number for such an expensive product.

Sony's overall market share is solid, thanks the seemingly ageless PS2, a nine-year-old machine which is on track to sell an astounding 8 million units this year. Looking ahead, the PS3 has a bright future, thanks to a superb software lineup, a wide-ranging media delivery system, and built-in BluRay support. Most likely, Sony's top managers calculated there was no need to cut the price of the PS3 until 2009.

It is true they have nothing to fear from Microsoft. The 360 has disqualified itself due to its small hard drive, lack of wireless, lack of first-party software, lack of free online service, and most of all, lack of next-gen DVD capacity. Sony-bashers take note: the difference between BluRay and DVD storage isn't four to one (25GB versus 7GB), it's fifty-seven to one. We do not exaggerate. Last November, Pioneer officially rolled out a line of 400GB BluRay discs, which will be compatible with Sony's PS3.²

But Microsoft isn't the issue. Sony's real opponent is the Nintendo Wii, which has already sold 22 million units this year, and may reach the stunning total of 25 million for 2008.

The only real disadvantage facing the Wii is its lack of high-definition graphics. This doesn't matter right now, thanks to the expensive price of its competitors and a vast installation base of non-HD television sets, but it will matter in an HD-dominated future. Still, Nintendo could easily rectify this by releasing a successor to the Wii -- let's call it the Wii 2 -- in 2011. In essence, Nintendo would move from the traditional ten-year hardware cycle to a much more focused five-year cycle.

Like its predecessor, the Wii 2 would be affordable from launch day ($250 or less), and would play all existing Gamecube and Wii titles. Unlike its predecessor, it would have BluRay capacity, much bigger storage, HD-quality graphics, and vastly improved motion control technology, for the simple reason that all of these things will become cheap and affordable by 2011.

Most of all, a potential Wii 2 would cut dramatically into the PS3's "fat tail". These are the lucrative sales which occur latest in a console's life, when manufacturing costs are lowest and software libraries are the largest. Sony could have forestalled this, by lowering the price of the PS3 to $299/299EUR this fall, which is roughly the cost of manufacture. Of course, Sony's game division would have reported a quarterly loss, due to non-manufacturing costs (marketing, development, distribution). But the move would have paid for itself in the long run, by enlarging the install base and creating economies of scale for the PS3's impressive media delivery and download services. Every PS3 sold today generates a triple revenue stream of games, media downloads, and BluRay media in the future.

Maybe the Wii 2 won't happen. Maybe Nintendo will be content to let Sony reaching cruising altitude, just as Sony has apparently decided to let Microsoft struggle on as a distant third in the console industry. Maybe the economic crisis forced Sony's hand, by convincing them it was better to maintain their profit margins rather than take on additional debt. Still, the lack of a price cut means Sony's destiny is no longer in its own hands.

-- DRR

1. VGChartz has constantly updated data on all the major videogame consoles here: http://www.vgchartz.com/

2. Jimmy Hsu and Adam Hwang. "Pioneer showcases 16-layer 400GB optical disc." Digitimes, December 1, 2008. Web: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20081201PD212.html

Resistance 2: Fall of Empire

The second installment of Insomniac's blockbuster PS3 franchise, Resistance 2, begins with our hero, Nathan Hale, escaping from the wreckage of a Chimeran tower in downtown London (the Chimera are a mysterious species which infect human beings in viral form, turning them into monsters). A US special forces team rescues Hale, none too gently, and whisks him off to a secret base in Iceland. But before the aircraft can touch, a Chimeran task force overwhelms the base, and you must step up to help your fellow soldiers escape certain death.

If this sounds like every ludicrous Cold War alien invasion movie ever made, think again. The first Resistance contained a number of tongue-in-cheek references to the Hollywood action thriller and horror film, and did something interesting by showing Britain, the arch-colonizer, being itself colonized by a seemingly unstoppable enemy. But Insomniac's world-class design team didn't stop there. Resistance 2 raises the bar by setting the first-person shooter genre towards the bourgeoning media cultures of the postcolonial world. The result is one of the premier documents of what might be called neocolonial science fiction. If you play shooters or enjoy science-fiction-themed videogames, Resistance 2 is more than simply a must-buy. It is the single most intelligent and best-written shooter in recent years.

To appreciate Insomniac's achievement, it's worth backtracking for a moment to the history of the shooter videogame as a genre. Most shooters feature highly stylized depictions of gunplay, where players face off against a range of human or nonhuman foes. The genre has been roundly and justifiably criticized for its excessive violence, obnoxious sexism, and problematic racial politics. To this day, most shooter heroes are generic white males, with the occasional token female backup or sidekick of color, and all too many shooter storylines glorify the US Empire's murderous wars.

The paradox, however, is that while almost every significant Hollywood action film of the 1980s and 1990s was pro-Empire, some of the greatest shooters have been ferocious critics of Empire. Typically, these videogames begin with an Ur-scene of imperial anxiety -- the catastrophic interdimensional accident in Half Life (1998), the unstoppable invasion by monstrous aliens in the original Resistance (2006), or the violent disruption of the space of the middle-class family and the suburban home in Max Payne (2001).

In the standard neoliberal or neoconservative script, this Ur-scene is used to justify massive and genocidal military repression. Such Ur-scenes are one of the bedrock tropes of the mass media of Empire. The Victorian-era newspapers of the British Empire published the most outrageous lies about anti-imperial guerilla movements, and demonized colonial peoples as barbaric, ape-like savages who mistreat their women. Until 2006, Fox News and CNN broadcast the most despicable lies about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, and demonized anyone even remotely Islamic or Middle Eastern as barbaric, ape-like savages who mistreat their women.

Such rabid imperialism runs counter to one of the central tendencies of the videogame culture, namely its drive to globalize its raw materials, by quoting, citing or otherwise borrowing from semi-peripheral and peripheral media cultures. These media cultures are saturated, due to their geopolitical location, with the daily reality of colonialism and neocolonialism.

As a result, the greatest videogame shooters were able to set the Imperial Ur-scene in motion towards its opposite -- towards the ghastly history of colonialism. Half Life invoked a united front of humans and alien species against an interstellar colonialism, while Neil Manke's resplendent freeware maps for the Half Life engine, the They Hunger (2000-2001) trilogy, used the horror-survival genre to critique the neoliberalization of Canada. Finally, Max Payne delivered the bullet-time bodyslam to Wall Street neoliberalism in its New York lair.

The blockbuster success of these franchises has, in turn, pushed the political center of gravity of the shooter sharply to the Left. Even mainstream franchises like Halo or Gears of War are careful to depict morally ambiguous colonialisms, problematic military hierarchies, and occasionally rational (if generally unsympathetic) aliens.

What Resistance 2 did which was genuinely new, however, was to revisit a key transition in the US Empire's past -- the moment when the 1940s turned into the 1950s. Of course, Hideo Kojima had done something similar, by setting Metal Gear Solid 3 in the midst of a fictional Cold War espionage operation in 1964. However, one of the central narrative requirements of the shooter genre is that the spectacle of warfare has to be both epic in scale, and awe-inspiring in scope. The battles have to mean something, otherwise the entire narrative experience comes apart at the seams.¹ One of the crucial and most overlooked aspects of this meaningfulness is the depiction of wartime solidarity. Pointing and clicking on a target over and over again is fundamentally uninteresting. Pointing and clicking in order to rescue your squad, save the mission or defend your homeland from attack is fundamentally thrilling.

Insomniac's key innovation was to create an alternate reality game-world, in which the Chimera do to the US Empire what the US Empire did to the planet in the 1950s. This was, to say the least, an enormous aesthetic risk, and not just in the sense that all too many US citizens have been corrupted by decades of US hegemony and might take this critique the wrong way. Situating the action in the 1950s also meant putting limits on weapons choices, voice acting and scenery, lest the anachronisms destroy the illusion of traveling back in time.

To make this game-world credible, Insomniac made three key design decisions, each of which diverged from the shooter canon. First, they avoided the tendency of other mainstream franchises to unnecessarily expand the duration of the single-player game. There are no gratuitous vehicle sequences, pointless escort missions, or teeth-gnashing flashbacks. Instead, the story stays tightly focused on Hale's personal trajectory.

On the plus side, this lack of padding concentrates the action, creating the feeling of constantly-increasing suspense. The danger here was that any hiccups or weaknesses in the storyline would destroy that suspense. Fortunately, Insomniac delivered a world-class script (according to the usually reliable Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), the story and screenplay were written by Insomniac stalwarts Todd Fixman and Brian Hastings, along with Insomniac's very own CEO, Ted Price).

Second, Insomniac fleshed out the game-world using a variety of other media and platforms. Insomniac hired Logan, the world-class independent studio which authored the PMC ads for Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4, to create a two-minute "Twisted History" clip outlining the alternate history of Resistance. Insomniac is also releasing a comic book version of the story, and is preparing to release a separate episode of Resistance for Sony's handheld PSP sometime next year. Unlike other recent blockbuster shooters we could name (but won't), Resistance 2's voice-acting is world-class. David Kaye as Nathan Hale and Dan Brown as Capelli deliver knockout performances, while voice actor superstar Khary Payton (Drebin in MGS4) is also listed in the credits. The voice actors for Melnikov, the Russian scientist, and Major Blake also deserve mention, though it's unclear who did the voice-acting for each in the game's liner notes. Instead of a first-person narrator, the story relies on in-game conversations with your squadmates and other characters, who relay the latest news and fill you in on the background of the conflict. There isn't a single dud line or false intonation, and you'll end up caring deeply about the characters and their respective fates.

Third, Resistance 2 transformed multiplayer into the centerpiece of game-play. This has been an ongoing tendency in the shooter genre, beginning with Neil Manke's They Hunger, the first game to successfully infuse single-player game-play with a multiplayer aesthetic. However, Resistance 2's multiplayer is a major step forwards for the entire shooter genre -- it is literally an entire second game packaged along with the single-player campaign. There is the usual set of teamplay scenarios -- free-for-all, capture the flag and human versus Chimera team matches. Insomniac also included a sixty-player face-off, where teams of up to thirty against thirty can battle in a lag-free online environment. Instead of allowing the sheer number of players to create confusion or boredom, players are organized into smaller teams with discrete objectives, creating the effect of an epic conflict.

The cooperative multiplayer, though, is a completely new beast. Up to eight online players, organized into three different player-classes (soldier, special ops and medic), battle against hordes of Chimera in a storyline which follows alongside Hale's mission. The result is intense, utterly unpredictable, and endlessly engaging. Players have to work as a team to survive: medics have to heal, special ops have to snipe and provide ammo, soldiers have to dish out damage. Try to act like a hero, and you'll be overrun in seconds. Know your role and support your team, and you'll be amazed at what you can achieve.

Similar to a role-playing game, participating in multiplayer allows your character to "level up" over time. You earn new equipment and special abilities, and are also rewarded with intel documents fleshing out more of the details of the storyline.

Most of the plot twists are far too good to spoil for those who never played the game, but here's one intriguing detail which isn't a spoiler. In the course of the game, we discover the government conducted secret experiments by exposing test subjects to Chimeran DNA. One of them, Jordan Shepherd, ends up being converted into a Chimeran creature code-named Daedelus. Our hero, Nathan Hale, was another such test subject. Hale is battling the clock, as he has only a limited amount of time before he is converted, too.

This rewriting of neoliberalism into anti-colonial biology points to one of the most striking aspects of Resistance 2: the way it interweaves US colonial history with the reality of contemporary neocolonialism. For example, the first chapter of the game shows the Chimeran attack on an overseas US military base on Iceland. This is not, as one might think, a reference to the Icelandic banking crisis -- the game's narrative was written well before the crash of 2008 -- but is instead a reference to the 750 military bases currently maintained by the US Empire.

The second chapter begins at a military research base in San Francisco. Insomniac delivers a magnificent setpiece battle here, against the apocalyptic spectacle of Chimeran ships reducing the city to rubble in the background. Any other game would have made the mistake of reveling in the destruction, replaying it over and over again until we were completely desensitized. Resistance 2 shows us this footage just once. As anyone who has visited San Francisco will tell you, there are indeed vast amounts of alien ships in the harbor -- but they are the freighters laden with goods, exported from East Asian factories to US consumers. The chapter concludes with a tongue-in-cheek boss battle against a giant Chimeran creature, which you have to (literally and figuratively) stir-fry. This is a sly critique of the neo-Orientalizing, neocon narrative of an unstoppable Asian export machine.

In fact, each chapter of the game refers to the violence of neoliberalism in some way or other. The grisly fate of Orick, California and Twin Falls, Idaho points to the rural economies devastated by neoliberalism, while the cocoons which convert humans into Chimerans are a grisly satire of neoliberal proletarianization. A scene aboard a Chimeran battleship pokes fun at the silicon rentiers of the Northwest, who have created giant mansions and elite conclaves amidst depressed rural industries and mill towns.

Somewhat further afield, the Bryce Canyon chapter hints at the ecological ravages of the global mining industry, while paying homage to Half Life's Black Mesa research facility. Meanwhile the chapter set in Chicago points to the slum-clearing and luxury towers of neoliberal real estate speculation, something echoed by the East Coast radio broadcasts of Henry Stillman, an announcer trapped in Chimeran-occupied Philadelphia.

Perhaps the most politically astute moment of the game occurs in a chapter set in Cocodrie, Louisiana. To avoid spoiling the plot, the transcript of a key scene is listed below in the endnotes -- don't read it if you are planning to purchase the game!² Suffice to say that the very survival of humanity as a species depends on a final, desperate mission against the Chimera.

One of the key battles is staged inside an abandoned plantation manor, while another takes place around the wreck of a steamboat. This is the moment that the history of the American South, or more precisely the history of American slavery and colonialism, touches base with the history of neocolonialism. The true target of the mission turns out to be a Chimeran fleet stationed near Chicxulub crater, a real-life geological formation in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

There are two potential referents here. The first is the beginning of the Mexican national revolution against Spanish Imperial rule in 1810, which signaled the arrival of a slew of Latin American national independence movements. The second is the 1994 uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico's impoverished, semi-feudal south, one of the first social movements of the periphery to openly critique neoliberalism.

This geopolitical insight is sealed by the micropolitical fable of the shocking conclusion, far too good to reveal here. Suffice to say that a new main character emerges, someone who is not marked as the generic, Anglo-Saxon white male -- but someone who is also true to the game-world. Heroes rise and fall, but the Resistance goes on!

-- DRR

1. This is why many of the most compelling sequences in WW II-themed shooters such as Call of Duty are the ones which depict the battles of the Eastern front, where the Soviet Red Army waged the biggest battles of the war and inflicted 80% of the Wehrmacht's casualties.

2. SPOILER ALERT: Because Resistance 2 was just released, the following text is blanked out in order to avoid spoiling the game for those planning on purchasing it in the near future. Simply scroll over the blanked-out text and highlight it with your mouse or cursor in order to view the contents. This is your final warning!

The opening cinematic of the Cocodrie chapter (available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdvnxudedYY) is spine-chilling: Capelli: "After Iceland, their ships rolled over SRPA bases coast to coast. They dug up towers we didn't even know about. Then two days ago the fleet started moving south. Command tracked it down to Mexico. The whole fleet just hovering there in the Gulf. Noone knows what to make of it." Hale: "Did the perimeter hold up?" Capelli: snorts wearily: "The perimeter. The perimeter's gone. All we have left is the Baton Rouge Protection Camp. Three million people who haven't seen so much as a supply truck in weeks. If we don't do something now, it's only a matter of time before they starve to death. Or worse. So. Are you going to make your last hours count? Because if not, I'd like to know in advance." Hale: unruffled: "Let's go." The number three million is not an accident. This is the rough estimate contemporary anthropologists and ethnohistorians have of the surviving population of indigenous Americans in the mid-1700s; the pre-colonial population was somewhere between 15 to 30 million. This massive extinction was mostly the result of European diseases, against which the indigenous people had no immunity. Insomniac's script translates this historical holocaust into contemporary terms, and asks us to imagine, if for only a second, what it would be like for a rich, powerful nation like the US to experience a similar such colonization and collapse.

Serebro Rocks the Semi-periphery

One of the keynote contradictions of the world music industry during the age of neoliberalism was the ambivalent relationship of the global semi-peripheries to the erstwhile metropole, namely the US Empire. This long-simmering ambivalence has now erupted into open defiance, as the developmental states of the semi-periphery begin the work of constructing the multipolar world in the teeth of US imperial opposition.

This eruption is by no means merely metaphorical or geopolitical. One of its most striking musical expressions is Russian band Serebro (http:///www.serebro.su), who created the year's top two hit singles, won MTV Russia's 2008 Band of the Year award, and concluded with an astounding live performance at the MTV award show.

Serebro is a three-woman band consisting of Elena Temnikova, Olga Seryabkina and Marina Lizorkina. Judging from a few press photos and the band's logo (three cats with arched tails), you might think they are just another generic girl band, a marketing stunt designed to retail a repressive, consumerized heterosexuality to impressionable teens.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Serebro's singers are all highly skilled vocalists and performers, with years of formal music, dance and educational training. The group was assembled by producer, musician and songwriter Max Fadeev, one of the true polymaths of the Russian musical scene (interestingly, Fadeev also played a key role in launching Russian superstar Glukoza's storied career, about which more in just a moment). The videos and various interviews make it clear that Temnikova is the dynamo at the center of the band, moving and singing with a restless, uncontainable energy, while fellow singers Seryabkina and Lizorkina provide modulation and counterpoint.

All three are sharp, intelligent women, who earned their star status through hard work. They are the perfect trio to deliver talented songwriter Daniil Babichev's compact, deft lyrics. Even the name of the band, Serebro, which literally means "silver", is an arch intellectual pun. The immediate reference is to Russia's semi-peripheral status as an exporter of precious metals to the world-economy, but it is also a nod to the so-called Silver Age of Russian poetry (the first two decades of the 20th century, whose female poets and artists are celebrated to this day).

In fact, Serebro's work follows in the footsteps of the first female rock superstar of 21st century Russia, Glukoza (the screen name of Natasha Ionova -- "Glukoza" literally means "glucose", the chemical term for sugar). It's a credit to Max Fadeev that he recognized Glukoza's potential as an artist at a time (2002) when noone thought Russian women could be rock stars. The privatization and economic collapse of the 1990s had unraveled the limited progress made by women of the Soviet era towards gender equality, and Russia's popular music scene reflected the recrudescence of reactionary gender roles.

By contrast, Glukoza delivered the utopian vision of a powerful, independent woman unafraid to defend herself or to make choices in life. Her music fused a feisty, post-Soviet feminist rock and roll with stylish, computer-literate videos. The result was a parade of catchy hits, ranging from the neo-punk "Pipyets" [Bullshit] to energetic dance numbers like "Svadba" [Wedding] and "Tanstui Rossiya!" [Dance, Russia!], all the way to subtle personal ballads such as "Babochki" [Butterfly].

Serebro took the next logical step, by moving from the citation or quotation of multinational forms to the creation of transnational content. They first won renown with "Song #1", a crisp and catchy pop number which does not veer too far from the rhythm-and-blues canon. However, their subsequent hit singles, "Dishi" ["Breathe"] and "Opium", are both powerful musical works released with equally compelling videos.

"Breathe" sets the archetypes of Latin American magic realism in motion towards Russia's own geopolitical location, halfway between Europe and Asia. At the beginning, images of stylized mermaids or underwater women are juxtaposed against the light and heat of arid landscapes. The band members are then surrounded by schools of giant male fish floating above a desert, stranded in wind-blown deserts, and later knocked head over heels by bullet trains (an ambidextrous symbol of the new metropoles, the EU and East Asia, as well as a possible nod towards the ending of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). Later, the bodies of giant floating fish turn into the metal hulls of aircraft, and the women begin to walk determinedly towards the camera through city streets, i.e. begin to acquire their own mobility. The very last scene negates the male gaze almost completely, as lead singer Temnikova turns away from the camera, shivering in the rain, dressed in a traditional shirt with folkloric symbols. Intriguingly, the song concludes with a male vocalist in the background, instead of the female backing vocals one might expect.¹

"Opium" does something even nervier, by drawing directly on the newest and most vibrant transnational mass media of them all, videogame culture -- or more precisely, from the visual toolkit of the shooter videogame. Look carefully at the video, and you will notice that the different members of Serebro are shown flirting, Bollywood-style (i.e. minimal physical contact and maximum suggestion) with the same male actor, in shots framed by long corridors and the repetitive flare of flashbulbs. This male actor is not a reference to any existing national culture industry. It is a reference to a virtual superstar: none other than lieutenant Nathan Hale, the hero of Insomniac's blockbuster videogames Resistance (2006) and Resistance 2 (2008)!

As it turns out, the video is sampling the "corridor crawl" of the shooter videogame genre, with its perspective-based battles, gun flashes and spectacular explosions. On the high-resolution version of the video, there are even lens-clouding effects visible. These are faint, nearly transparent texture patterns superimposed on the position of the camera lens, a technique used by videogames to mimic the effect of outdoor location shots (the physical specks of dust, haze, mud, soot and smoke which gather on a real life camera lens). Even the sound-stage the three vocalists perform on is a reference to the hazard-suit charging station at the beginning of Half Life.

The true appeal of "Opium", though, lies in its perfectly-pitched vocals, backed by harshly effective thrash guitars and one of the most compelling opening hooks since Kurt Cobain's "Heart-shaped Box". The refrain is delivered mostly in a single rising half-step set in a minor key, which verges occasionally on a whole step, only to fall back (literally and figuratively) to the original half-step. This borrows from one of the central musical developments of the 1990s, the negation of the major chord changes of 1970s funk and 1980s R & B by the austere, repetitive pulse of a half-step downwards transition, memorialized by Kool Keith's Dr. Octagon (1996). Put another way, it is as if the half-step bass pulse of Dr. Octagon has generated its own musical subjectivity.² The subaltern may not speak, but the semi-periphery owns the dance floor.

These two works alone would have secured Serebro's place as the musical phenomenon of 2008. But Serebro's performance at the MTV awards almost defies description. They delivered a song called "Sound Sleep", which might seem at first glance to be a typical dystopian love ballad in the tinseled tradition of glam rock. Serebro's website (www.serebro.su) has an early version of this song, called "Pink", which is less interesting than the live performance, for two reasons. First, the sheer rawness of live fuzz guitars is missing, a crucial acoustic counterpoint to the vocals. Second, and more importantly, key parts of the lyrics are sung by a male voice. The live version is sung entirely by the women, and this seemingly minor change transforms the song into an instant classic.

To understand why this is so, it's worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on the greatest musical phenomenon of a rather different semi-periphery, namely Ireland's U2. U2's first and most compelling album, Boy (1979), was created during a time when Ireland was still a stagnant Second World economy, dominated by British capitalism and devoid of the social buffers of the Western European welfare states. Musically, the result was a potent admixture of postcolonial Irish despair and gospel vocals, all backed by the ghostly electronic outline of anti-Thatcherite punk rock.

Perhaps U2's most expansive meditation on the neoliberal incarceration of the semi-peripheries, though, was its 1984 hit song, "Bad". Lead singer Bono originally wrote the song as a testament to a personal friend of his, a victim of drug addiction. Yet like many of the greatest 1960s aesthetic works about addiction (everything from William S. Burroughs' magnificent Nova Express to the Velvet Underground's searing "Heroin"), U2's "Bad" transcends the tragedy of the particular addict by narrating the experience of the collectivity. That is, drug addiction is really a metaphor for a far broader and deeper set of dependencies: the subalterneity of the Cold War semi-peripheries vis-a-vis the US Empire. The concluding lyrics are well worth quoting in detail:


If you should ask, then maybe
They'd tell you what I would say
True colours fly in blue and black
Blue silken sky and burning flag.
Colours crash, collide in blood-shot eyes.
If I could, you know I would
If I could, I would let it go.

This desperation, dislocation
Separation, condemnation
Revelation, in temptation
Isolation, desolation
Let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away

I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, wide awake
I'm not sleeping
Oh no, no, no.³

Clearly, U2 had a certain insight into the ideological exhaustion and political dead-end of postcolonial nationalism. The "burning flags" and multiple references to "dislocation", "isolation and "desolation" underline the disconnect between the utopian nationalism of the Irish Republican Army, and the depressing reality that even the nominally independent parts of Ireland were a giant neocolony. But what limits this insight is its masculine perspective. It is the voice of the educationally privileged male knowledge-worker with the cultural capital to move to Britain or America, the strata who later became the skilled professionals of Irelands' EU-subsidized, post-Maastrict boom.

What Glukoza and Serebro offer us, however, is the story which U2 could not and did not tell. This is the story of the women of the semi-periphery. Because it was women who bore the brunt of the economic immiseration, social disruption, and compensatory male revanchism of neoliberalism. As living standards fell and social subsidies disappeared in post-Soviet Russia, women lost guaranteed (albeit low quality) jobs, as well as access to healthcare and childcare. The burden was heaviest on children and families.

One of the little-known consequences of the neoliberal assault on Russia was a "baby strike": Russian women stopped having children they couldn't afford to raise. Russia's birth-rates in the 1990s dropped like a rock, prompting the same market fundamentalists who foisted neoliberal policies on Russia to write triumphant screeds about the impending demographic implosion of the Russian nation. It seemed the neoliberals wouldn't be happy until every last Russian perished from the face of the earth, no doubt as retribution for the unforgivable crime of daring to defy the US Empire.

But the Bear wasn't going extinct, it was just hibernating. Once Putin and the siloviki (former Soviet intelligence personnel) restored order and rescued the economy from the petro-chemical grip of the oligarchs, birth rates began to recover. Since 2005, Russia's fast-growing developmental state encouraged second and additional children via financial and moral incentives, the construction of kindergartens, and upgrades of the welfare state. The resulting baby boom has stabilized Russia's demographic profile.

Now at last we can begin to give Serebro's performance of "Sound Sleep" the interpretation it deserves. The sound-track begins with a hollow, mechanical drumbeat, reminiscent of the sound-track of Konami's Silent Hill horror-survival franchise. A low bass pulse in the background traces out the three notes of a minor third, matching the jagged line of a heartbeat on a medical monitor projected on a giant wallscreen. The horror-survival theme is accentuated by the projection of a beating heart on a rectangular set of panels above the audience. The band members file on stage dressed in oddly disturbing black dresses, the size and shape of ballroom gowns, although their rough cut and formless texture suggests incarceration or penitence.

When they grasp the microphones, each one of the tips of their fingers have miniature, stylized bandages. These bandages are not a reference to videogame culture, but to one of the classic works of late 20th century European theater, namely Heiner Mueller's Hamletmachine (1979), where the character of Ophelia is wrapped in bandages at the end of the play.

Next, the band members pose in abstract, desexualized poses. They hold their hands above their heads, gyrating stiffly, hinting a ballroom dance which never quite happens. Russian television audiences would probably identify the referent here as the Satan's ball sequence near the end of a recent televised adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's magnificent The Master and the Margarita, one of the greatest novels of the Stalin era. However, we will argue there is another referent here, namely the Bollywood dance sequence. Bollywood films have been age-old favorites of Russian audiences ever since the Raj Kapoor classics of the 1950, and the dance sequence in middle of Serebro's video for "Song #1" is an extended homage to Bollywood. In "Sound Sleep", the issue is the circulation of female bodies between the mass media of the semi-periphery and true periphery.

At first glance, the lyrics limit this corporeality to the problematic equivalence of female performers and a high-technology appliance:

Take a ride, play with it
Wanna pull my trigger and shake with it
I'll show you who's up on this game
Come 'n check you know my name

The lyrics are delivered entirely in English, which is normally a telltale sign of a repressive neoliberal consumerism. In this case, however, things get interesting in the second stanza, where this equivalence breaks down. One key lyric states, "I start to feel the game/ the game is very simple", and the conclusion points to "the next level". The singers have taken control of this particular game.

Behind the band, the image of a giant eye is projected in crystalline, high-definition splendor on a giant wallscreen, while a few splotches of red blood criss-cross the screen. The feminine lashes hint at two significant predecessors: the billboards of a woman's eye in Remedy's Max Payne (2001) and Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (2004). Finally, flame-guns go off in the foreground.

In the first recorded version of this song, the key refrain: "It's like a sound sleep, don't wake to wake up" was delivered by a male singer. Here, though, the women not only sing the line, but their three voices merge into unison as they do so. When Lizorkina intones the phrase, "Tingles down my spine...", we suddenly begin to understand that the women of the semi-periphery are singing about themselves -- their own bodies, their own life-choices, and their own subjectivities.

At this point, the music halts for a split second -- and the stage erupts into pandemonium. The thrash guitars go ballistic, while the wallscreen depicts a gargantuan, slow-motion explosion. The flame-guns erupt, and the singers' voices merge into an eerie wail, climbing half-step by half-step through a I-IV chord, only to settle on a minor third. The musical effect is reminiscent of the peak moment of Cobain's posthumous classic, "Pain", only without Cobain's self-Orientalizing vocal track (in particular, the refrain "You know you're right", half self-lacerating justification, half neo-patriarchal accusation).

On the wallscreen, the earth-shattering explosion fades away to reveal a vast, slow-motion spatter of blood-smears, streaming across the surface. Gender crashes into geopolitics, with the force and fury of the 2008 market meltdown. To top it off, the camera pans back at one moment to reveal a woman in a veil, singing along with the band members. This is Farhad, an Iranian singer invited to perform at the 2008 MTV show. Below is a snapshot of Farhad, as well as a still photo of Serebro's lead singer, Elena Temnikova, in the middle of the performance:



The neocons have been clamoring to bomb Iran -- a powerhouse of the Central Asian semi-periphery -- back into the late Pleistocene for decades, but Iran's media culture (in solidarity with its fellow semi-periphery, Russia) has had the last laugh.

Fittingly, Temnikova sings the final verse, and the gleam in her eye hints at a future beyond the epic system crash of neoliberalism. If the flame-guns are an overt reference to Russia's recent energy-wealth (i.e. the gas flares of oil wells), then the stylized heartbeat at the end of the song is not a symbol of death, but of rebirth. It heralds the arrival of Russia's mighty developmental state, a.k.a. Bearzilla, on the stage of world history. Serebro, the daughters of Bearzilla, red in developmental-state tooth and Cheburashka-claw, rocks the semi-periphery.

-- DRR

1. Serebro's "Dishi" (with English subtitles added by a fan): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGSjofooXnQ

High-resolution file available here: http://www.serebro.su/sections/video/files/dyshi/serebro.dyshi.avi

2. Serebo's "Opium": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtfEC55vFkg
A slightly modified high-resolution file is available here: http://www.serebro.su/sections/video/files/opium/serebro.opium.avi

This second version contains one extra sequence not in the original, cf. a bullet-time circular pan of the three band members tossing flower petals at the male actor who has been wooing them all, a feminist gesture missing from the original.

3. These lyrics are quoted from U2's official site: http://www.u2.com/music/lyrics.php?song=47&list=b

One of the best performances of the song is available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7KjiDZMD5o

4. Low resolution version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9O1_IM5HHI

High resolution version: http://media.elenatemnikova.com/Video/SoundSleep.50new.avi

Stay tuned for Uplink 15: the Creative Commons issue!